Xenia Boodberg Lee (November 28, 1927 – September 27, 2004) was an American concert pianist, based in the

San Francisco Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a List of regions of California, region of California surrounding and including San Francisco Bay, and anchored by the cities of Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose, California, S ...

Early life

Xenia Boodberg was born in

Oakland, California Oakland is a city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. state of California. It is the county seat and most populous city in Alameda County, California, Alameda County, with a population of 440,646 in 2020. A major We ...

, the only child of

Peter A. Boodberg Peter Alexis Boodberg (born Pyotr Alekseyevich von Budberg; 8 April 1903 – 29 June 1972) was a Russian-American scholar, linguist, and sinologist who taught at the University of California, Berkeley for 40 years. Boodberg was influential in ...

(1903-1972) and Elena (Helen) Boodberg (1896-1980). Her father was a Russian-born

Baltic German Baltic Germans ( or , later ) are Germans, ethnic German inhabitants of the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, in what today are Estonia and Latvia. Since Flight and expulsion of Germans (1944–1950), their resettlement in 1945 after the end ...

linguistics scholar and professor of Oriental Languages at the

University of California The University of California (UC) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university, research university system in the U.S. state of California. Headquartered in Oakland, California, Oakland, the system is co ...

in Berkeley. Her aunt Valentina A. Vernon recalled that her parents tried to raise her without speaking English as a small child, "only French and Russian".Bancroft Library, ''Russian emigré recollections: life in Russia and California : oral history transcript / 1979-1983'' (University of California Libraries 1986): Vernon 27. via

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...

Xenia Boodberg was a creative child, publishing poems and stories in the Berkeley newspaper at age 8, and winning an essay contest on fire prevention from the Berkeley Lodge of Elks, also in 1936. She was performing at public events as a pianist before and into her early teens. She earned an associate in arts degree at the University of California in 1948. She also studied with pianist

Egon Petri Egon Petri (23 March 188127 May 1962) was a Dutch-American pianist. Life and career Petri's family was Dutch. He was born a Dutch citizen in Hanover, Germany, and grew up in Dresden, where he attended the Kreuzschule. His father, a professi ...

Mills College Mills College at Northeastern University in Oakland, California is part of Northeastern University's global university system. Mills College was founded as the Young Ladies Seminary in 1852 in Benicia, California; it was relocated to Oakland in ...

, and with pianist Adolph Baller.

Career

Soon after college, in January 1949, she gave a program of piano music by composers

Darius Milhaud Darius Milhaud (, ; 4 September 1892 – 22 June 1974) was a French composer, conductor, and teacher. He was a member of Les Six—also known as ''The Group of Six''—and one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His composition ...

Roger Sessions Roger Huntington Sessions (December 28, 1896March 16, 1985) was an American composer, teacher, and writer on music. He had started his career writing in a neoclassical style, but gradually moved towards complex harmonies and postromanticism, a ...

, Joaquín Nin-Culmell,

Béla Bartók Béla Viktor János Bartók (; ; 25 March 1881 – 26 September 1945) was a Hungarian composer, pianist and ethnomusicologist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century; he and Franz Liszt are regarded as Hunga ...

, and

Claude Debussy Achille Claude Debussy (; 22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first Impressionism in music, Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most influe ...

in New York, of which ''The New York Times'' reviewer commented, "Miss Boodberg remains a pianist of unusual potentialities, especially in the field of new music". She played recitals and concerts, especially twentieth-century works, in the San Francisco Bay area and elsewhere, often and for many years afterwards, into the 1970s. She was a member of the San Francisco Musical Club and played with the Oakland Symphony and the Stockton Symphony.

Personal life

Before February 1950, Xenia Boodberg married Richard Henry Lee, a marine sergeant and Korean War veteran, and a descendant of American founding father

Richard Henry Lee Richard Henry Lee (January 20, 1732June 19, 1794) was an American statesman and Founding Father from Virginia, best known for the June 1776 Lee Resolution, the motion in the Second Continental Congress calling for the colonies' independence fr ...

. They had two children, Richard and Julie. She died in 2004, aged 76 years.Xenia B. Lee
US Social Security Death Index, via NewspaperArchive.com

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lee, Xenia Boodberg 1927 births 2004 deaths Musicians from Oakland, California University of California alumni 20th-century American classical pianists 20th-century American women pianists American people of Baltic German descent American women classical pianists Classical musicians from California 21st-century American women